by Laurie Penny
Saying ‘sexism is also part of Western culture’ does not mean that the experience of women in the West is exactly the same as the experience of women in Middle Eastern dictatorships and war zones. Do you know why that is? Can you guess? It’s because the world is not divided into ‘things that are exactly the same as each other’ and ‘things that are total opposites’.
I actually can’t believe I’m having to explain this right now. I thought we covered this in kindergarten. Those of us who have moved beyond that level can, if we really try hard, understand that it’s not either ‘sexism is exclusively practised by Muslim men’ or ‘sexism is exactly the same everywhere’. This is what we call a ‘false dichotomy’ when we get to big school.
The oppression of women is a global phenomenon because patriarchy is a global phenomenon. It’s embedded in the economic and social structures of almost every nation and community on Earth. Sexism and misogyny, however, look different across boundaries of culture and religion, as well as across divides of race and class and between generations. This is not a complicated thing to understand. I’m really trying not to be patronising. But a lot of people are behaving like vicious children over this issue, so if you’re not one of them, I hope you understand why right now I wish I could put half the Internet on time out in a nice safe room where they can scream and break things without hurting themselves or anyone else.
And there’s something else I’ve noticed, too. For all that these people claim to hate ‘Islamic’ sexual violence, it seems to fascinate them. In the past three years, I’ve lost count of the white men – and it is almost always white men – who have emailed, tweeted and sent me doctored pictures sharing their graphic fantasies in which feminist harpies like me are stoned to death, fucked to death, genitally mutilated, whipped, burned and gang-raped – not by them, of course. By those awful Muslims. There seems to be an almost erotic fascination with the rhetoric of sexual violence these men associate with Muslims – it’s so awful that they have to concentrate really hard on the details and maybe save some screenshots to contemplate later in private.
I’ll be blunt. I think some people out there are very excited by their conception of ‘Islamic’ violence against women. It allows them to enjoy the spectacle of women being brutalised and savaged while convincing themselves that it’s only foreign, savage men who do these things. If hearing that makes you angry, if it makes you want to smash my bitch face in and tell me I’m a whore who deserves to be raped to death by ISIS, then congratulations, you’ve just proved my point.
The point is that misogyny knows no colour or creed, and perhaps it’s time we did something about that. We’re used to a society where a basic level of everyday sexism, sexual violence and assault is accepted. So if I argue that sexist violence by Muslim men is not qualitatively different from other kinds of sexist violence and if I say that refugees should be treated the same as European citizens, I must be saying that everyone should get a free pass to treat women like walking meatbags, right?
Wrong. It’s time to take rape, sexual assault and structural misogyny as seriously every day as we do when migrants and Muslims are involved as perpetrators. That means that, yes, refugees must learn to respect women as human beings.
Citizens, too, must learn to respect women’s agency and autonomy. Men and boys of every faith and none must learn that they are neither entitled to women’s bodies nor owed our energy and attention, that it is not okay, ever, to rape, to assault, to abuse and attack women, not even if your ideology says it’s okay. That goes for the men’s rights activists, the anti-feminists and fanatical right-wingers as much as it does for religious bigots.
If we want to hold up Europe as a beacon of women’s rights, that’s fantastic. Let’s make it happen. If we’re suddenly a continent with a zero-tolerance policy on sexual violence and ritualised misogyny, let’s seize that energy. Let’s see real investment by the state and individuals in holding aggressors to account and supporting victims. It’s easier to pin misogyny on cultural outsiders than it is to accept that men everywhere must do better – but any other attitude is rank hypocrisy.
SOCIALISM AND/OR FEMINISM
It’s a good job I wasn’t in the office the week comedian, celebrity-shagger and saviour of the people Russell Brand was sashaying around. Not that there’s anything wrong with a good sashay. The revolution – as Brand’s guest edit of the New Statesman was modestly titled – could do with a little more flash and glitter. It’s just that had I been in the office I would probably have spent a portion of my working hours giggling nervously, or hiding in the loos writing confused journal entries. My feelings about Russell Brand, you see. They are so complex.
Brand is precisely the sort of swaggering manarchist I usually fancy. His rousing rhetoric, his narcissism, his history of drug abuse and his habit of speaking to and about women as vapid, ‘beautiful’ afterthoughts in a future utopian scenario remind me of every lovely, troubled student demagogue whose casual sexism I ever ignored because I liked their hair. I was proud to be featured in the ‘Revolution’ issue that this magazine put out, proud to be part of the team that produced it. But the discussions that have gone on since then about leaders, about iconoclasm and about sexism on the left need to be answered.
I’d like to say first off that there are many things apart from the hair and cheekbones that I admire about Brand. He’s a damn fine prose stylist, and that matters to me. He uses language artfully without appearing to patronise, something most of the left has yet to get the hang of. He touches on a species of directionless rage against capitalism and its discontents that knows very well what it’s against without having a clear idea yet of what comes next, and being a comedian he is bound by no loyalty except to populism. And he manages without irony to say all these things, to appear in public as a spokesperson for the voiceless rage of a generation, while at the same time promoting a comedy tour called ‘Messiah Complex’.
I admire the audacity of it. It’s a bloody refreshing change from all those bland centrist politicians who grope for a cautious, cowed purity of purpose and action which they still fail to achieve. Brand, unlike almost every other smiling bastard out there, is exactly what he says he is: a wily charmer with pots of money who thinks the system is fucked and can get away with saying so. Yes, he is monstrously self-involved and self-promoting; yes, he is wealthy and famous and has, by many people’s standards, no right to speak to any working-class person about revolution and be taken seriously. He also quite clearly means what he says, and that matters.
I agree with Brand about the disappointments of representative democracy. If I must pick a white male comedian to lead my charge, I’m on Team Russell. And I am glad – profoundly glad – that somebody has finally been permitted to say in public what commentators and politicians have not yet dared to suggest: that rising up together in anger, as young people did in London and elsewhere in 2011, might be a mighty fine idea.
It’s not just Brand’s wealth and fame that allow him to say such things. Consider how the rapper and artist M.I.A. was treated when she said very similar things about the London riots two years ago. Brand is playing the court jester, and speaking limited truth to overwhelming power in one of the few remaining ways that won’t get you immediately arrested right now – from an enormous stage made of media money, liberally thickened with knob jokes, with a getaway sports car full of half-naked pop stars parked out the back and one tongue firmly in his cheek.
But what about the women?
I know, I know that asking that female people be treated as fully human and equally deserving of liberation makes me a concrete-gusseted feminist killjoy and probably a closet liberal, but in that case there are rather a lot of us, and we’re angrier than you can possibly imagine at being told our job in the revolution is to look beautiful and encourage the men to do great works. Brand is hardly the only leftist man to boast a track record of objectification and playing cheap misogyny for laughs. He gets away with it, according to most
sources, because he’s a charming scoundrel, but when he speaks in that disarming, self-deprecating way about his history of slutshaming his former conquests on live radio, we are invited to love and forgive him for it because that’s just what a rock star does. Naysayers who insist on bringing up those uncomfortable incidents are stooges, spoiling the struggle.
Acolytes who cannot tell the difference between a revolution that seduces – as any good revolution should – and a revolution that treats one half of its presumed members as chattels, attack in hordes online. My friend and colleague Musa Okwonga came under fire merely for pointing out that ‘if you’re advocating a revolution of the way that things are being done, then it’s best not to risk alienating your feminist allies with a piece of flippant objectification in your opening sentence. It’s just not a good look.’
I don’t believe that just because Brand is clearly a casual and occasionally vicious sexist, nobody should listen to anything he has to say. But I do agree with Natasha Lennard, who wrote that ‘this is no time to forgo feminism in the celebration of that which we truly don’t need – another god, or another master’. The question, then, is this: how do we reconcile the fact that people need stirring up with the fact that the people doing the stirring so often fail to treat women and girls like human beings?
It’s not a small question. It goes way beyond Brand. Speaking personally, it has dogged years of my political work and thought. As a radical who is also female and feminist I don’t get to ignore this stuff until I’m confronted with it. It happens constantly. It’s everywhere. It’s Julian Assange and George Galloway. It’s years and years of rape apologism on the left, of somehow ending up in the kitchen organising the cleaning rota while the men write those all-important communiqués.
It comes up whenever women and girls and their allies are asked to swallow our discomfort and fear for the sake of a brighter tomorrow that somehow never comes, putting our own concerns aside to make things easier for everyone else as good girls are supposed to. It comes up whenever a passionate political group falls apart because of inability to deal properly with male violence against women. Whenever some idiot commentator bawls you out for writing about feminism and ‘retreating’ into ‘identity politics’, thereby distracting attention from ‘the real struggle’.
But what is this ‘real struggle’, if it requires women and girls to suffer structural oppression in silence? What is this ‘real struggle’ that hands the mic over and over again to powerful, charismatic white men? Can we actually have a revolution that relegates women to the back of the room, that becomes vicious when the discussion turns to sexual violence and social equality? What kind of fucking freedom are we fighting for? And whither that elusive, sporadically useful figure, the socialist?
NICE GUYS DON’T
‘I always think about why women are superficial and disgusting.’
As pick-up lines go, it could use some work. This, however, is OkCupid, the vast, weird pink-and-blue-toned jungle of the id masquerading as a dating site, where rare birds of modern romance flutter among the night-terrors of human loneliness and despair and the suspicious skin irritants of late-night hook-uppery.
The man who has written this on his profile appears to be in his early thirties. He has an unflattering haircut and what looks like a miniature kettle in one corner of his dating profile photo. He describes himself as a ‘pretty decent guy’ who doesn’t want to play ‘your stupid friendzone game’.
Miniature Kettle Man is one of many unfortunates who has had his insecurities and latent sexism exposed to a world of giggling women on the website ‘Nice Guys of okay Cupid’. This is a Tumblr set up to collect images of all the many, many self-professed ‘nice guys’ out there whose publicly listed beliefs about women appear to prove them anything but. ‘Stupid women, satanic women enticing men to fall into perilous friendzone,’ says one Prince Charming, who appears to be speedballing in his photo.
It’s a dispiriting catalogue of desperation and misogynist entitlement. Wherever he is, Miniature Kettle Man probably thinks his worst nightmares have come true: all over the world, ladies who don’t even know him are laughing at him. The Hive Vagina has passed judgement on Miniature Kettle Man. One can only hope he is making a tiny cup of tea to cheer himself up with.
Because yes, it’s hard not to laugh. It’s hard to suppress a horrified snigger at the unexamined hypocrisy, at the sheer number of men out there who seem to believe, for example, that stating publicly that ‘a no is just a yes that needs a little convincing’ is morally or logically consistent with being ‘a nice guy’ who women would be clamouring to date if we weren’t such shallow sluts. Anticipation of that laughter is probably what prompted so many men to screech abuse at the Tumblr’s author over the Internet: ‘enjoy life as an abject, hated feminazi bitch’, writes one ‘nice guy’. ‘You don’t realise that by being who you are, you are disgracing the entire human race, ha, it’s no wonder genocide happens.’ What a charmer. I wonder if he’s still single?
The site is compelling, in a gross sort of way. Reading it fills you with a righteous rage that quickly starts feeling icky when you realise a few of the chaps on there haven’t actually said anything overtly sexist – they’re just a bit overweight and ungroomed and feeling sorry for themselves and wondering why ‘women’ (by which they mean ‘women they fancy’) won’t consider having sex with ‘nice guys’ (by which they mean ‘men very much like me’, by which they mean ‘me’).
For a lot of these ‘nice guys’ who can’t get dates, it looks like nothing a shave and a bit of positive self-talk couldn’t cure. Unfortunately for those of us who believe in the basic decency of the species, many of these chaps seem instead to have translated their fear of rejection, their loneliness and humiliation, into active misogyny, a savage self-pitying resentment which must make perfect sense at 4 a.m. on a lonely weeknight while flicking between OkCupid and RedTube.com but which makes rather less sense when exposed to the cold pixel glare of Internet disapprobation.
The most chilling theme is the frequency with which these ‘nice guys’ have answered some of the dating site’s more suspicious stock questions – ‘do you feel there are any circumstances in which a person is obligated to have sex with you?’, ‘is abortion an option in the case of unwanted pregnancy?’ – in ways that are at best terrible attempts at humour and at worst howling klaxons of unexamined sexism.
The truly frightening thing is that you can see where the internal logic comes from. A lot of these guys must occasionally feel like at least one woman, somewhere, must be obliged to have sex with them, and I’m prepared to bet that those occasions coincide quite neatly with ‘times when one is most likely to be writing an online dating profile’. And that’s how you end up with your best love-me face on a public-humiliation site telling the whole world you think no doesn’t always mean no, feeling like an utter prick and rightly so.
Reading ‘Nice Guys of okay Cupid’ reminded me that for men, as well as for women, the political is personal. Deeply, often painfully personal. Observing the ugly logic whereby these so-called ‘nice guys’ have twisted their private fear of rejection into gender-loaded loathing and self-justification of rape culture did not improve my day one little bit, but it did make me think again about how personal sexism like this really gets, and why.
Let’s look at this from a different angle. Something that happens when the word ‘feminist’ is attached to your work and life in any manner is that men want to talk to you about sex. This initially came as a surprise to me, but it’s true: for every chap who suddenly remembers a vital appointment across town when you mention that you’ve written a book about sexism and anti-capitalism, there’s another who just wants to know, in confidence, if this particular little fetish he has, whatever it is, makes him a bad person. Or who wants to know if it’s all right to watch porn (it’s complicated, but yes), or if he still has to pay the whole of a bill when taking a lady out to dinner (it’s complicated, but no). Or who wants to k
now whether sadomasochism is sexist. For straight men who are starting to think about gender and sexism and considering the notion that, contrary to what they may have grown up learning, women might well be full human beings with dreams and desires just like them, the personal is political.
Yes, it’s about who and how you fuck. Yes, it affects your sense of self, your conception of your own masculinity – particularly if you’ve previously built your gender identity on the idea of ‘winning’ women, and particularly if that gender identity is knotted up with feeling lonely, rejected and hurt when life doesn’t reward you with a hot girlfriend. It’s not surprising at all that it’s here, on a dating site, that these men’s deepest prejudices are written in clear, fist-gnawing Verdana typescript.
And – here’s the thing – there has to be an answer to these guys that isn’t just pointing and laughing. Calling out rapists and online predators is a more than legitimate strategy for dealing with abuse. But how are we supposed to handle common-or-garden sexist dickwaddery when it puts photos on the Internet and asks to be loved, or at least to enter what one heavily photoshopped smiler refers to hopefully as ‘the bone zone’?
Are we obligated to be understanding when men write spurious bullshit about sluts over their ‘looking for’ lists? Are we ever going to be able to have a conversation about consent, about respect, about fucking, and maybe even about love, that doesn’t descend into bullying and invective? Oh, Internet. I ask so little of you, and you always shoot me down. Maybe I should stop being such a Nice Girl.
7
Violence
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
Hannah Arendt
